Geneva, a leading international financial center, is seeing the emergence of a burgeoning fintech sector. Today, the region is home to some 39 fintech companies that cover various segments ranging from blockchain and crowdfunding, to regtech and wealthtech.
To keep up with Geneva’s fast-evolving fintech landscape, we’ve compiled a list of the most noteworthy fintech startups from the city. These have made notable strides over the past years, and are worth keeping a close eye on.
Komgo
Komgo is a software development and technology services company. It is the creator of a blockchain technology-based platform that digitalizes trade finance, automating finance transactions and allowing banks, traders and other participants to transact, manage and monitor deals in real time, boosting up transparency of trade operations.
Komgo offers four main product lines: Konsole, which connects corporates and banks for documentary credit workflows and data exchanges; Market, for price discovery and deal execution; Check, for the digital exchange of data and documents with external parties; and Trakk, which allows for the creation of smart digital documents with embedded metadata and built-in audit trail functionality.
Komgo is backed by more than a dozen banks, commodity houses and trading companies. In May 2021, it closed its third funding round with more than CHF26 million in new equity raised.
Mt Pelerin
Mt Pelerin is a regulated Swiss fintech company providing products and services aimed at bridging the crypto world with traditional finance.
Its two core products today are Bridge Wallet, a mobile app that allows users to easily invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum assets, and the Bridge Protocol, an open source asset tokenization technology.
Mt Pelerin is also working on a comprehensive banking offering featuring a full reserve account where 100% of deposits would be kept in the safe in Switzerland. It will be natively global with multi-currency crypto-fiat IBANs, fully tokenized and connected to digital asset marketplaces.
Mt Pelerin was bootstrapped by its own community through an equity crowdfunding that raised more than US$2 million in 2018, and was the first company to offer tokenized shared with full voting and dividend rights to the public.
Taurus
Founded in 2018, Taurus is a digital assets and blockchain specialist. It claims to have developed the most advanced and most complete digital asset platform in the industry that allows financial institutions to issue/onboard, manage, and book any type of tokenized securities and digital currencies on one unified platform
Taurus received a securities firm license in April 2021 from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) and secured that same month over CHF 10 million in a Series A funding round.
In July, Taurus was selected to join the new Mastercard Start Path cryptocurrency and blockchain program. In the program, Taurus will be collaborating on the most promising and relevant use cases with Mastercard’s own digital asset teams as well as with its worldwide ecosystem of customers and partners.
SwissLending
Founded in 2015, SwissLending claims it is the largest crowdlending platform in the country that has facilitated more than 30 loans worth in excess of CHF 135 million.
SwissLending specializes in loans for real estate professionals, connecting qualified/accredited investors with real estate developers. It provides debt, equity and land banking investment opportunities in Switzerland, France and Luxembourg.
SwissLending offers relatively short-term investments. Debt investments can generally be recovered between 6 to 24 months depending on the duration of the work. The minimum investment varies by project.
Foxstone
Established in 2016, Foxstone is a real estate crowdfunding platform offering a turnkey service to invest in the Swiss real estate starting with just CHF 25,000.
The platform offers a vast category for selection and easy access, allowing property owners and real estate sponsors to enter into contact with potential acquirers or lenders.
Through Foxstone, investors can either purchase shares in rented investment in co-ownership and collect rental income, or directly lend to real estate developers and collect a fixed amount of interest.
Since launching its platform in 2018, Foxstone has grown to a community of over 12,000 investors. The platform has helped members become co-owners of 24 buildings worth CHF 104 million.
In June 2020, Foxstone raised a “multi-million dollar investment” from investors including Vaudoise Assurances.
Wecan Group
Founded in 2015, Wecan is a Swiss-based company first active in the crowdfunding space before pivoting to blockchain technology in 2018.
Today, Wecan co-creates, run and scale joint ventures that leverage blockchain technology. In addition, it also offers two products: Wecan Comply, a platform that simplifies the compliance processes between banks and external asset managers, and Wecan Tokenize, a platform to issue, distribute and custody digital assets.
Wecan has already won over many private banks including Geneva-based Pictet, Bank Julius Baer, Lombard Odier, UBP, Mirabaud, Edmond de Rothschild, Syz and Reyl. Major independent asset managers such as Swisspartners, Bedrock and Stanhope Capital are also using the company’s solutions.
Wecan raised nearly CHF 2 million in late 2018.
InvestGlass
InvestGlass is the developer of a client and prospect management platform for bankers, wealth managers, advisers and family officers. Its all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) is designed to facilitate more efficient prospecting and onboarding of new clients, as well as the management of relationships with existing clients.
InvestGlass’ product core features regroup customizable forms, CRM integrations, mix digital and paper, monitoring and remediation, score and client classification, smart conditional logic, approval processes, and automation.
The company serves about 60 banks and asset managers. In addition to Geneva, it has offices in Singapore, Madrid and Panama.
